The Eternal Question
by teh liz
Summary: [rentchallenge piece] A desperate student asks her professor an abiding but rather important question.


_Author's Note: This was a challenge at the rentchallenge LJ community awhile ago. Basically, insert yourself into the story and ask any character a question and they have to answer it. I was inspired too late to submit for the challenge, but I had to finish it anyway. It was good to stretch my muscles. Also, reviews are the food of life, people. Lastly, this is intended to take place between Goodbye Love and Finale A in the second act.  
Disclaimer: If you think I own it, you need a reality check more than I do._

I was so beyond fucked, and not in the good way.

My term paper was due in a week, and I couldn't start it. I didn't know where to start it. Thanks to schedule screw ups (I wanted to take an ax to the people in the Office of the Registrar, but common decency prevented it), this could possibly be known as the worst semester of my life. I tried to look on the bright side and see this as an opportunity to get my general education credits out of the way so that I could focus on my majors for my last two and a half years. General Chemistry, Creative Writing, and Western Civilization were not giving me trouble. It was Introduction to Philosophy that gave me hell.

It was a lot of reading, and not that I minded that, it was spitting the theory back out that I couldn't do. As a girl who liked to consider herself open-minded and intelligent, this was rather embarrassing. But after almost an entire semester of floundering with the material and the harrowing task of writing the paper in the week ahead of me, I decided to take up my professor's open-ended offer of coming to his office outside of class in order to discuss material.

Professor Collins sat at his desk, kicked back in his chair with his feet elevated on the desk with his attention in a thick tome that boasted a title about something to do with computers, and I steeled myself before knocking at the open door. He looked up, and gave a congenial smile. "Can I help you?"

I managed to return the smile, if a bit tentatively. "Hi. I'm… in your Tuesday-Thursday Intro to Philosophy class and… I'm having some trouble," I tried to articulate without gesticulating too much. I was a good reader, although sometimes I went to fast and my comprehension went down the drain, and I tended to be a bit too literal in analyzing material. That, and I suppose that it didn't help much that a lot of our classes had either been cancelled or cut short due to a series of apparently personal emergencies on his part. I didn't want to lay blame, especially with him, but I didn't want it to lay with me either.

"Come in, then, come in," he said, motioning and putting his feet down on the floor. "Remind me of your name again?"

That had been one big change from my high school where I graduated with a class of one hundred and twenty-eight. My classes could be more than double that, here at NYU. "Elizabeth," I said, coming in and sitting at one of the free chairs.

"The one from Iowa," he said and my cheeks flushed red, and not just because I was now seated in a heated building in my scarf and wool coat. "Not that it's bad! I just remember you relating a lot of things in the readings in Weekly Reviews to home."

"Oh. Well." I stammered, looking at my hands. Why was I always so inarticulate when I needed to speak? "I've been having trouble with my term paper."

"I honor your procrastination," he said with this vague, amused smile that I was used to seeing in class and it put me at ease. "Let me check your topic," he added, shuffling around some papers and finding what he was looking for – the keyboard to his computer. He did some file pulling, I suppose, and I surveyed his office. The bookshelves that lined the walls were filled past capacity with the works of Plato, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, and many other people I'd never even heard of. The filing cabinet (which I suspect only served as another horizontal surface to put things on) was plastered with photographs.

"You turned in _The Poetics_ by Aristotle," he said, and snapped my attention back to the task at hand.

"Oh… yes," I said. "I'm having a rough time is all, getting it started."

"I think," he postulated, leaning back in his desk chair again, "that your choice of material to consult doesn't do a very good job of giving you something to work with in order to answer the question at hand."

I was more than willing to admit that. I'd been fifteen minutes late to class after getting stuck in an elevator in my dorm building and had completely forgot it was the day we had to turn in a source for our term paper. I'd hurriedly scribbled the first thing that came to my mind and handed it in and was stuck. "…Yeah," I said looking at one of my hands on the arm of the chair. "Although, it's not _completely_ irrelevant—"

"Oh, no, I agree there," he said. "_Poetics_ is very important literature, particularly for playwrights during the Renaissance and was quite often a measuring stick for the value of theatre – but I'm afraid it doesn't have much to do with answering the meaning of life, I don't think."

There was a hint of irony in his voice that was almost annoying. That was our single question for the term paper, supposed to mirror one we wrote at the beginning of the year, to show how we've changed, I suppose. "What is the meaning of life?" indeed. I'd thought about it and realized I'd never really _had_ thought about it, and I think I wrote some bullshit about serving others and bettering the world. My friend, completely unfazed by the question, merely wrote "42" and turned it in. Then again, she'd been taking this class by choice. I thought I had a better idea of what the meaning of life according to me was going to be, but tying it in with _The Poetics_ was going to be the challenge. "Sir," I started, before I could stop myself, "what do _you_ think is the meaning of life?"

Professor Collins seemed taken aback by my question. He leaned forward in his chair again and seemed to contemplate the top of his desk and then the filing cabinet. I looked at the filing cabinet, too. He should really find a better place for all those photographs, I thought. They drew so much attention and were obviously important to him. He was silent for a long time. The only sound was the drone of the heater and there was a slightly uncomfortable silence between the two of us as he continued to be in contemplation and I shifted uncomfortably in the seat. "I think," he said, after a moment, "self-actualization is the meaning of life. Through whatever means necessary."

"Like what?" The answer had come with such conviction that now it was my turn to be startled. "I mean – how?"

Like Plato must have smiled at Aristotle, Professor Collins smiled at me. "Whatever means necessary will change from person to person. Ideally, it would be done the least painful way possible. Completely painless would be too much to ask for. So the way I see it –"

"Take the good with the bad?" I said, a bit dryly.

"There is that. The most pleasure with the least pain possible."

I let that sink in. "… You're talking about love, professor," I finally said, doubtfully. "Your answer to the meaning of life is love?"

"Love," he started. He didn't sound particularly cynical, maybe a little sad, but I wouldn't hesitate much to call it a scoff. "You're of the cinema generation. You either think that love is everywhere or it is nowhere but on the silver screen. Oh, it's hardly your fault, you've been bombarded with romanticized crap since you were young, but… love just isn't _real_ for you all. You have this concept of love being step-by-step and a checklist and the problem with love is that's not what it is. You can't categorize it or put it in a box or make it into a list, it's too many different things at once. I have friends—" At this point he broke off, slid his chair to the filing cabinet and took one off, handing it to me. 

I looked at it. A tall, hazel-eyed man in a Ramones t-shirt had his arms around a small, Hispanic girl with a lot of curly hair who appeared to be wearing rubber. My first impression was that it was taken outside in the dark, as the couple was the only thing illuminated. "They look happy," I commented, awkwardly holding the photograph.

"They love each other," he said. "So much that it rips them apart, from each other and everyone else they care about. After they fight, Roger is unreachable and Mimi – disappears." His voice caught, and I tactfully pretended not to notice, just as my parents had raised me. "They're on their way," he continued, reaching for the photograph and I gave it back, unresisting. He sounded confident, but there was just a tinge of doubt in his voice. "But they're scared of what they see in each other."

"What do they see?" I asked, waiting.

"Themselves," he answered, putting the photo back on the filing cabinet.

Something clicked in my brain. "You think… people aren't self-actualized until they find someone exactly like them."

"I think people can't be the best possible version of themselves until they see all of their faults for what they really are. And while some do this better than others, we as a species are rather adept at ignoring things we don't want to see, particularly in ourselves," he told me. "But when someone – someone you love and respect and care for deeply, at that, shows you your faults either by mirroring them or reacting negatively to them, that is when they are hardest to ignore."

My cheeks burned again when I remembered the thoughts I'd had to myself at the beginning of the session about blame. "You've—" I started and cut myself off again, remembering I was talking to my _professor_ and not my favorite uncle or something. "Shit, I'm sorry, that was nosey of me, I'll stop now." I stood up and picked up my bag, throwing it over my shoulder, a bit awkwardly with the coat.

"You're perfectly in bounds to ask," he said, but I still didn't think I was. I looked at the toes of my boots instead of looking back up at him. When it became clear that I wasn't going to press the issue, he continued, "Do you think you have enough to start your paper now?"

"I'll manage," I said. I could certainly build on that idea. It would take a lot of thinking and shifting, but I could do it. I wasn't sure how I'd work in _The Poetics_ yet, but I could manage. Even if I somehow managed to bomb the paper but still do well on the final, it would be fine. I had nothing to lose.

Except maybe Professor Collins' respect, but I as long as I spoke my mind, I think I could retain that. "I'll see you on Tuesday," I said.

"Have a good weekend, Elizabeth," he gave me a nod. I took that as my cue to exit and did so, but once I was around the corner from the door I heard him say in a low tone, "Oh, _Angel._"


End file.
